Hillary, America's Miss Havisham

This week, the sorest loser since Dickens’ Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, Hillary Clinton, began peddling her latest book What Happened. (No question mark at the end because it’s didactic, not really an inquiry. She knows the answer and she’s going to instruct us out of her infinite wisdom and years-long expertise, including two such losses.)

On Twitter, the actor James Wood offers a visual of the reasons she proffers, feigning regret that he was not included.

The book is so bad that far-left Counterpunch asks whether she stiffed the ghostwriter out of the final payment (as she did to the ghostwriter of her previous overcompensated book).

Apart from casting blame upon the waters far from herself, she makes a number of preposterous suggestions. One of my favorites is the notion that Orwell’s 1984 reminds us that we should trust those in positions of authority “our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence.” Not only is this a gross misreading of 1984, which, in fact, shows the horror of an authoritarian rule by “experts,” it comes at a time when any sentient person has developed good reason to be skeptical of “experts,” people who have for eight long years under Obama misled us on everything.

Iowahawk, in a series of tweets, expresses that jaundiced view of the rule by experts suggestion.

I trust experts. My dad's radiologist, master electricians, Ford flathead specialists. I object to the indiscriminate use of "expert."

”I might be inclined to trust experts more if "expert" wasn't the adult version of a band camp participation trophy.

If the book weren’t stunningly risible enough, Hillary compounds it by saying things like this to interviewers, as she did to Rachel Maddow: “South Korea is literally within miles of the border with North Korea.”

To be sure this viewpoint is not unanimous. The New Republicthinks her legacy is “huge and everlasting:”

“These dismissive judgments aren’t just wrong, but betray a fundamentally flawed view of what’s important in politics. By their logic, only winning matters; only those who reach the White House leave a legacy.

Some of the biggest political legacies have been left by losing presidential candidates. [snip] Barriers are never broken all at once, but as with the journey from Smith to Kennedy, they require the work of pioneers who fail to win, but clear a path nonetheless. “

Although an astonishingly few Americans seem, per a recent poll, to understand much about the Constitution, I think it still affords the right to even this nonconformist view.

* More than one in three people (37%) could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. THE FIRST AMENDMENT.

* Only one in four (26%) can name all three branches of the government. (In 2011, 38% could name all three branches.)

* One in three (33%) can't name any branch of government. None. Not even one.

* A majority (53%) believe the Constitution affords undocumented immigrants no rights. However, everyone in the US is entitled to due process of law and the right to make their case before the courts, at the least.

(And the First Amendment protects the rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, freedom of the press and the rights of people to peaceably assemble, in case you were wondering.)

Ironically, the author who tut-tuts about American ignorance of the Constitution and its protections, reveals his own limited knowledge of it. Facebook friend Tom Gelsthorpe explains:

The title is wrong. Americans don't know "literally nothing," but too few know the basics. Nevertheless, Chris Cillizza does a fine job of reviewing the disheartening level of ignorance among the general public, then sneaks in his own personal grudge in the last paragraph.

Donald Trump is the "shining example" of civic ignorance? Why not Hillary, Bernie, or dozens of other candidates? Many pundits are worse. Citizens United has been misrepresented or lied about continuously since the decision was made. Bernie & Hillary both campaigned on promises to appoint judges who would reverse it. But it's not about "opening the floodgates" of private spending for campaigns.

Citizens United was a group that wanted to run a documentary unflattering to Hillary Clinton. The Federal Election Commission sued to stop the film's showing on the grounds that it was illegitimate campaign spending. The Supreme Court ruled that the FEC was trying to suppress legitimate political speech. In essence, the Court said it's legal to say, "The King is a fink."

If Citizens United had gone the other way, or if Hillary had been elected, we'd be on the brink of criminalizing the statement, "The Queen is a fink."

If Trump was really "a fascist" as his haters insist, Kathy Griffin, Johnny Depp and a host of other loudmouth celebrities would have disappeared by now. Antifa would be holed up in a cave somewhere.

If the standard banning "The King is a fink," applied to Trump, entire news organizations would be out of business. CNN in particular puts out little but hate speech nowadays.

Imagine if the tables were turned, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had been interpreted as campaign material, and suppressed by the FEC.

It's impossible for any politician or politically-appointed body to determine what is or is not campaign material or political speech. That's why free speech has to be protected.

Never in my wildest dreams would I recommend jailing Keith Olbermann, even though I think he's nuts. Or suing Albert Gore, even though I feel he's dishonest and a menace to rational thought. That's his right. But we should discuss these issues in the plain light of day, without Thought Police looming over us.

Even as she continues to make herself the object of derision, facts hidden before the election bring to light her corruption.

The emails show ‘what happened’ was that Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin obviously violated laws about the handling of classified information and turned the State Department into a pay for play tool for the corrupt Clinton Foundation,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, in a swipe at Clinton's newly released campaign memoir "What Happened." “The clear and mounting evidence of pay for play and mishandling of classified information warrant a serious criminal investigation by an independent Trump Justice Department.”

The article details the specifics.

But there is, as Ronco’s on-air salesmen used to say, “more.” More evidence of the DNC’s former head Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s IT scandal involving the Awan brothers keeps trickling out, and it seems clear that Hillary and her aide Huma Abedin were not the only Democrats heedless of the need to secure classified information.

What's more concerning, say senior House officials who spoke to Circa, is that Imran Awan was also allegedly transferring files -- including documents and emails -- of House Democrats to a secret server connected to the less secure House Democratic Caucus. The organization was then chaired by Rep. Xavier Becerra, who left Congress in January after being sworn in as the Attorney General of California.

[snip]

Officials are now asking the question of why the computer was left but the answers remain elusive.

"There is no reason to accommodate all the members' data on one server and one that was apparently hidden," said the Senior House official. "Why didn't Xavier Becerra know this, because it happened on his watch? Each member had their own server to protect against this and Awan intentionally tried to hide what he had done from investigators."

Becerra's office did not return phone calls for comment.

The House official told Circa that Awan was also allegedly uploading "terabits of information to dropbox so he was possibly able to access the information even after he was banned from the network." The official said there is a need for a full congressional investigation on the matter.

"I think this may lead to information as to who really accessed the DNC server -- everybody talks about Russia -- but look at the access (Awan) had and potentially those emails could have been sold," the House official added.

Police informed Becerra that the server was the subject of an investigation and requested a copy of it. Authorities considered the false image they received to be interference in a criminal investigation, the senior official said.

Of course, Hillary, Abedin, Becerra, and Schultz are just a few of the players in a large cast of what happened to us, which includes Barack Obama and Susan Rice.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress to protect its Iran nuke sellout, it packaged the story to the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress”. The idea was that Obama Inc. was “legitimately” spying on Israel, that it just happened to intercept the conversations of some members of Congress and American Jews, and that the eavesdropping somehow meant that its victims, Jewish and non-Jewish, rather than its White House perpetrators, should be ashamed.

The White House had demanded the conversations between Prime Minister Netanyahu, members of Congress and American Jews because it "believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu's campaign." This was domestic surveillance carried out under the same pretext as in the Soviet Union that had also accused its dissident targets of secretly serving foreign interests.

Obama and his minions had used the NSA to spy on Americans opposed to its policies. Including members of Congress. They did this by conflating their own political agenda with national security.

Since Obama’s spin was that the Iran Deal was good for national security, opponents of it were a “national security” threat.

And its fig leaf for domestic surveillance was that a “foreign leader” was involved.

Now get ready for a flashback.

Susan Rice’s excuse for unmasking the names of top Trump officials in the Obama eavesdropping effort was that they were meeting with the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. The carefully packaged CNN story, which reeks of the Goebbelsian media manipulations of “Obama whisperer” Ben Rhodes, tries to clumsily tie the whole thing to the Russians. But for once it’s not about Russia. It’s about Islam.

The UAE has become best known for being the first regional Muslim oil state to turn against the Muslim Brotherhood and the entire Arab Spring enterprise. It helped mobilize opposition to the Qatari agenda. The ultimate outcome of that effort was that Egypt was stabilized under a non-Islamist president and the Islamist takeover in Libya is looking rather shaky. The Saudi coalition against Qatar, the sugar daddies of Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, has its origins in that effort.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress before, it was to protect Iran. This time around, the gang that couldn’t spy straight was trying to protect the Muslim Brotherhood. The Iran Deal was never about stopping Iran’s nuclear program. It certainly does not do that. Nor was it ever meant to do it.

Instead the real goal of the Iran negotiations was a diplomatic arrangement with the Islamic terror state. The fruits of that arrangement can be seen from Beirut to Baghdad. They are written in blood and steel across Syria, Israel and Yemen. And that arrangement had to be protected at all costs.

Like Hillary, Obama confused and conflated his own interests and objectives with national interests and seriously undercut national security in the process. That’s what happened.

This week, the sorest loser since Dickens’ Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, Hillary Clinton, began peddling her latest book What Happened. (No question mark at the end because it’s didactic, not really an inquiry. She knows the answer and she’s going to instruct us out of her infinite wisdom and years-long expertise, including two such losses.)

On Twitter, the actor James Wood offers a visual of the reasons she proffers, feigning regret that he was not included.

The book is so bad that far-left Counterpunch asks whether she stiffed the ghostwriter out of the final payment (as she did to the ghostwriter of her previous overcompensated book).

Apart from casting blame upon the waters far from herself, she makes a number of preposterous suggestions. One of my favorites is the notion that Orwell’s 1984 reminds us that we should trust those in positions of authority “our leaders, the press, experts who seek to guide public policy based on evidence.” Not only is this a gross misreading of 1984, which, in fact, shows the horror of an authoritarian rule by “experts,” it comes at a time when any sentient person has developed good reason to be skeptical of “experts,” people who have for eight long years under Obama misled us on everything.

Iowahawk, in a series of tweets, expresses that jaundiced view of the rule by experts suggestion.

I trust experts. My dad's radiologist, master electricians, Ford flathead specialists. I object to the indiscriminate use of "expert."

”I might be inclined to trust experts more if "expert" wasn't the adult version of a band camp participation trophy.

If the book weren’t stunningly risible enough, Hillary compounds it by saying things like this to interviewers, as she did to Rachel Maddow: “South Korea is literally within miles of the border with North Korea.”

To be sure this viewpoint is not unanimous. The New Republicthinks her legacy is “huge and everlasting:”

“These dismissive judgments aren’t just wrong, but betray a fundamentally flawed view of what’s important in politics. By their logic, only winning matters; only those who reach the White House leave a legacy.

Some of the biggest political legacies have been left by losing presidential candidates. [snip] Barriers are never broken all at once, but as with the journey from Smith to Kennedy, they require the work of pioneers who fail to win, but clear a path nonetheless. “

Although an astonishingly few Americans seem, per a recent poll, to understand much about the Constitution, I think it still affords the right to even this nonconformist view.

* More than one in three people (37%) could not name a single right protected by the First Amendment. THE FIRST AMENDMENT.

* Only one in four (26%) can name all three branches of the government. (In 2011, 38% could name all three branches.)

* One in three (33%) can't name any branch of government. None. Not even one.

* A majority (53%) believe the Constitution affords undocumented immigrants no rights. However, everyone in the US is entitled to due process of law and the right to make their case before the courts, at the least.

(And the First Amendment protects the rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, freedom of the press and the rights of people to peaceably assemble, in case you were wondering.)

Ironically, the author who tut-tuts about American ignorance of the Constitution and its protections, reveals his own limited knowledge of it. Facebook friend Tom Gelsthorpe explains:

The title is wrong. Americans don't know "literally nothing," but too few know the basics. Nevertheless, Chris Cillizza does a fine job of reviewing the disheartening level of ignorance among the general public, then sneaks in his own personal grudge in the last paragraph.

Donald Trump is the "shining example" of civic ignorance? Why not Hillary, Bernie, or dozens of other candidates? Many pundits are worse. Citizens United has been misrepresented or lied about continuously since the decision was made. Bernie & Hillary both campaigned on promises to appoint judges who would reverse it. But it's not about "opening the floodgates" of private spending for campaigns.

Citizens United was a group that wanted to run a documentary unflattering to Hillary Clinton. The Federal Election Commission sued to stop the film's showing on the grounds that it was illegitimate campaign spending. The Supreme Court ruled that the FEC was trying to suppress legitimate political speech. In essence, the Court said it's legal to say, "The King is a fink."

If Citizens United had gone the other way, or if Hillary had been elected, we'd be on the brink of criminalizing the statement, "The Queen is a fink."

If Trump was really "a fascist" as his haters insist, Kathy Griffin, Johnny Depp and a host of other loudmouth celebrities would have disappeared by now. Antifa would be holed up in a cave somewhere.

If the standard banning "The King is a fink," applied to Trump, entire news organizations would be out of business. CNN in particular puts out little but hate speech nowadays.

Imagine if the tables were turned, and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had been interpreted as campaign material, and suppressed by the FEC.

It's impossible for any politician or politically-appointed body to determine what is or is not campaign material or political speech. That's why free speech has to be protected.

Never in my wildest dreams would I recommend jailing Keith Olbermann, even though I think he's nuts. Or suing Albert Gore, even though I feel he's dishonest and a menace to rational thought. That's his right. But we should discuss these issues in the plain light of day, without Thought Police looming over us.

Even as she continues to make herself the object of derision, facts hidden before the election bring to light her corruption.

The emails show ‘what happened’ was that Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin obviously violated laws about the handling of classified information and turned the State Department into a pay for play tool for the corrupt Clinton Foundation,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, in a swipe at Clinton's newly released campaign memoir "What Happened." “The clear and mounting evidence of pay for play and mishandling of classified information warrant a serious criminal investigation by an independent Trump Justice Department.”

The article details the specifics.

But there is, as Ronco’s on-air salesmen used to say, “more.” More evidence of the DNC’s former head Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s IT scandal involving the Awan brothers keeps trickling out, and it seems clear that Hillary and her aide Huma Abedin were not the only Democrats heedless of the need to secure classified information.

What's more concerning, say senior House officials who spoke to Circa, is that Imran Awan was also allegedly transferring files -- including documents and emails -- of House Democrats to a secret server connected to the less secure House Democratic Caucus. The organization was then chaired by Rep. Xavier Becerra, who left Congress in January after being sworn in as the Attorney General of California.

[snip]

Officials are now asking the question of why the computer was left but the answers remain elusive.

"There is no reason to accommodate all the members' data on one server and one that was apparently hidden," said the Senior House official. "Why didn't Xavier Becerra know this, because it happened on his watch? Each member had their own server to protect against this and Awan intentionally tried to hide what he had done from investigators."

Becerra's office did not return phone calls for comment.

The House official told Circa that Awan was also allegedly uploading "terabits of information to dropbox so he was possibly able to access the information even after he was banned from the network." The official said there is a need for a full congressional investigation on the matter.

"I think this may lead to information as to who really accessed the DNC server -- everybody talks about Russia -- but look at the access (Awan) had and potentially those emails could have been sold," the House official added.

Police informed Becerra that the server was the subject of an investigation and requested a copy of it. Authorities considered the false image they received to be interference in a criminal investigation, the senior official said.

Of course, Hillary, Abedin, Becerra, and Schultz are just a few of the players in a large cast of what happened to us, which includes Barack Obama and Susan Rice.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress to protect its Iran nuke sellout, it packaged the story to the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress”. The idea was that Obama Inc. was “legitimately” spying on Israel, that it just happened to intercept the conversations of some members of Congress and American Jews, and that the eavesdropping somehow meant that its victims, Jewish and non-Jewish, rather than its White House perpetrators, should be ashamed.

The White House had demanded the conversations between Prime Minister Netanyahu, members of Congress and American Jews because it "believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu's campaign." This was domestic surveillance carried out under the same pretext as in the Soviet Union that had also accused its dissident targets of secretly serving foreign interests.

Obama and his minions had used the NSA to spy on Americans opposed to its policies. Including members of Congress. They did this by conflating their own political agenda with national security.

Since Obama’s spin was that the Iran Deal was good for national security, opponents of it were a “national security” threat.

And its fig leaf for domestic surveillance was that a “foreign leader” was involved.

Now get ready for a flashback.

Susan Rice’s excuse for unmasking the names of top Trump officials in the Obama eavesdropping effort was that they were meeting with the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. The carefully packaged CNN story, which reeks of the Goebbelsian media manipulations of “Obama whisperer” Ben Rhodes, tries to clumsily tie the whole thing to the Russians. But for once it’s not about Russia. It’s about Islam.

The UAE has become best known for being the first regional Muslim oil state to turn against the Muslim Brotherhood and the entire Arab Spring enterprise. It helped mobilize opposition to the Qatari agenda. The ultimate outcome of that effort was that Egypt was stabilized under a non-Islamist president and the Islamist takeover in Libya is looking rather shaky. The Saudi coalition against Qatar, the sugar daddies of Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, has its origins in that effort.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress before, it was to protect Iran. This time around, the gang that couldn’t spy straight was trying to protect the Muslim Brotherhood. The Iran Deal was never about stopping Iran’s nuclear program. It certainly does not do that. Nor was it ever meant to do it.

Instead the real goal of the Iran negotiations was a diplomatic arrangement with the Islamic terror state. The fruits of that arrangement can be seen from Beirut to Baghdad. They are written in blood and steel across Syria, Israel and Yemen. And that arrangement had to be protected at all costs.

Like Hillary, Obama confused and conflated his own interests and objectives with national interests and seriously undercut national security in the process. That’s what happened.